The last few weeks have seen a lot of debate over Free Basics. Mark Zuckerberg has recently published a page explaining the intent of the app and stating that everyone is eligible for Free Basics, as long as they follow the technical guidelines.
Let’s see how Free Basics affects the new startup, Chewie’s Cupcakes, run by Luke Skybaker and his sister Leia Oregano.
Facebook Intercepts and Reads All Your Data
The first problem with Free Basics is that Facebook intercepts and reads all your data, via their Internet.org proxy. This works exactly like asking your friend to give you ‘proxy’ in class: Users tell Facebook that they are interested in Chewie’s Cupcakes, and then Facebook tells you what they heard. You also respond via Facebook.
There are three main problems with this:
First of all, it’s impossible to get any secure information from your customers without Facebook knowing about it, including passwords or credit card information. This effectively bypasses the security provided by HTTPS. Even if you have an SSL certificate, Facebook unencrypts user data, before reencrypting it and sending it to you.
Secondly, it’s impossible to have any logged in content without compromising on security. Facebooks Terms explicitly state that secure content may not be loaded anyway.
Finally, Facebook now knows each of your users, and which cupcakes they are interested in. Facebook may try to sell them cupcakes from Darth Taters, a long time partner of Facebook.
How Do Non-Developers Read these Guidelines?
As you can imagine, the tech guidelines published by Facebook are primarily understood by developers. This makes it difficult for Luke and Leia (both bakers), who have zero tech knowledge. They now have to hire a tech team, just to ensure they always comply with Facebook’s standards. Darth Taters, of course, has a big tech team already, so it’s easy for them to further their advantage.
No Interactive Content
The Free Basics guidelines explicitly prohibits any Javascript, Flash or Java Applets. While Flash and Java Applets are both in decline, Javascript is still the primary tool available for building interactive content on any website. Javascript is what makes it possible for Gmail to click to interact with elements on the screen, without a slow reload of the entire page.
Luke and Leia had a page allowing users to build their dream cupcake, choosing the colour, flavour, and size. This page, sadly, does not work on Free Basics.
No Videos
Free Basics explicitly does not allow any video content. This is especially important for the Skybaker twins, as theirs is the only site on the internet which teaches the art of cupcake building in their native language Aldereese. The TRAI has also identified video as an easy way to deliver content to citizens, who may not necessarily be literate.
Tough to Do Any Analytics Except Page Views
As Javascript is disabled, it’s very hard to monitor anything on your site, other than recording the page impression. It’s difficult to monitor how long the page took to load in the wild, figure out your page’s heatmaps, or try out an A/B test. You are basically at Facebook’s mercy to tell you how your users are behaving.
The Tech Specs Themselves Mandate Best Practices
Although we’ve covered the specs most relevant for most people, there are a few other points, which most developers can circumvent.
- No vector images – Free Basics disallows SVG images
- No fonts in .woff format – This is actually strange, because WOFF fonts are actually smaller than their .ttf counterparts. Also, font designers may not allow you to convert WOFF fonts into TTF.
- No IFrames – Which actually makes it difficult for most advertisers, who run on a different server
- No Large Images – Which you can get around with an image resizing CDN
The Approval Process is Unforgiving of Violations
The Approval Process is run by a human, so you are at their mercy. However, after a few weeks of struggling, Luke and Leia successfully manage to get their site on Free Basics. But their scruffy looking assistant Ham Solo has just (accidently) posted a video on baking cakes. Suddenly, the entire site has been blocked from Free Basics.
In conclusion, it looks like not everyone will be able to get on the Free Basics platform. If you are looking to read more before sending an email to the TRAI (either for or against the proposal, please check out this great Reddit thread)
Also Read: Facebook Free Basics: What the Hell Is It & Why You Should Care.
(Tejas Dinkar is the Director of Engineering for Quintype Inc. He got a bit of advice from Kiran Jonnalagadda and Dheeraj Kumar (mostly Star Wars puns) for this article.)
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